The Campaign in -Gates: The Not-at-All Significant Scandals and Gaffes of the 2012 Primary and Presidential Contest (Part Two)

Our politics blogger sums up the most inadvertently funny sideshows on the road to the November 6, 2012, presidential election.

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Gaffer: Wealthy horse Rafalca Romney, whose bid in the London 2012 Olympics was the subject of international mockery.

Victim: The reputation of the proud, storied sport of dressage, also known as “horse ballet.”

Date: August 2012.

Short-term consequences: Americans were reminded that Rafalca Romney’s co-owner, Mitt Romney, not only is the kind of man who could own an Olympic horse but is the kind of man who owns an Olympic horse and agreed to name that horse “Rafalca.”

Gaffer: Potential vice bro-sident Paul Ryan, who said he ran a marathon in under three hours, then, when confronted with the unlikeliness of this claim and the paucity of records supporting as much, said he misremembered his time.

Victim: The, like, game, man.

Date: August 2012.

Short-term consequences: Ryan walked—no, ran—the statement back and said what actually happened was that he ran a four-hour marathon.

Long-term consequences: Voters who could not run a single mile in under a half-hour without having a massive coronary incident were able to feel smug about Ryan “admitting” his four-hour marathon time.

Gaffer: Discolored carnival prize Donald Trump, who, for weeks, teased of a “big surprise” at the Republican National Convention.

Victim: Briefly, the Republican Party, before Hurricane Isaac blew in as a convenient excuse for the G.O.P. to quietly cancel Trump’s Tampa appearance.

Date: August 2012.

Short-term consequences: Staffers at VF.com had fun making this graphic.

Long-term consequences: Trump, whose appetite for bad publicity knows no relief, ended up re-doing the “big surprise” bit in October, this time promising a donation to charity in exchange for the release of Obama’s college and passport applications and records.

Gaffer: Corpulent hypocrite Newt Gingrich, whose reputation as something of a lonely, lost boy was solidified by his own bizarrely timed, unrelenting comments about the necessity of colonizing the moon.

Victims: The women of the moon! Has Gingrich run out of Earth wives?

Date: Forever and ever.

Short-term consequences: Gingrich’s nomination concession statement was strangely literary. “I want to just say I’m cheerfully going to take back up the issue of space,” he said. “I’m not totally certain I will get to the moon colony.” This very site called it “about as poignant an expression of existential despair as we’ve ever heard.”

Long-term consequences: As of press time, there is not yet an American colony on the moon, and Newt Gingrich is not yet its sovereign.

Long-term consequences: Months later, the Romney campaign made a point of forcing its candidate to publicly swallow some Chipotle. Affordable, mass-produced overcompensation with a side of guacamole, please.

Gaffer: Newt Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, who not only took a sunny, smiling vacation photo outside the gates of Auschwitz but released said photo publicly. (“We never want to go home! Ha, no, not literally. Not like that.”)

Gaffer: Ron Paul. No, just kidding, Newt Gingrich again! This time: Gingrich excused himself for his multiple extramarital affairs by admitting that his moral transgressions were “partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country.”

Victims: Gingrich’s emotionally and sexually betrayed first and second wives.

Date: March 2011.

Short-term consequences: Lots of jokes about Gingrich’s American flag being at full mast.

Gaffer: Mitt Romney, who, after his wife’s plane made an emergency landing, wondered aloud, “I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were . . . When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no—and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

Victim: The Cranbrook Schools physics department.

Date: September 2012.

Short-term consequences: Reporters on the scene quickly clarified that at the time of his comment, Romney was joking.

Long-term consequences: It becomes increasingly clear that Mitt Romney does not have the best sense of humor.

Gaffer: Creaky old robot Mitt Romney, who, in naming things that he loved about his manufacturing-laboratory site of Michigan, told a crowd, “This feels good, being back in Michigan. You know, the trees are the right height.”

Victims: Abnormally large or small Michigan-based trees, who thought Romney was being sarcastic.

Date: February 2012.

Short-term consequences: The comment engendered what were probably the first ever Mitt Romney–and–Jack Handey comparisons.